Tabula icon
Tabula icon

Tabula

 9 likes

Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files. Extract tables from PDFs.

Home screen. Import PDF documents, or view previously imported PDF documents.

License model

  • Free • Open Source

Application type

Country of Origin

  • US flagUnited States

Platforms

  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Linux
Interface to specify where structured data is located. Option to auto detect and tweak how it detects. Also repeat selection over many pages.
Preview extracted data, tweak tabular data extraction, then export in desired format, such as csv.
Tabula alternatives  
Discontinued

The latest version (1.2.1) is from June 2018.

5 / 5 Avg rating (1)
9likes
1comment
18alternatives
0news articles

Features

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Properties

  1.  Lightweight

Features

  1.  Portable
  2.  Convert PDF to Excel document
  3.  Tables
  4.  Convert PDF to Text

 Tags

  • table
  • auto-detect-structured-data
  • pdf
  • extract-multipage-tables
  • pdf-tool
  • pdf-to-csv
  • pdf-to-json

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Tabula information

  • Developed by

    US flagManuel Aristarán, Mike Tigas and Jeremy B. Merrill

  • Licensing

    Open Source (MIT) and Free product.

  • Written in

  • Alternatives

    18 alternatives listed

  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Category

Office & Productivity

GitHub repository

  •  7,002 Stars
  •  660 Forks
  •  541 Open Issues
  •   Updated Mar 14, 2025 
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Our users have written 1 comments and reviews about Tabula, and it has gotten 9 likes

Tabula was added to AlternativeTo by phidrho on Dec 19, 2017 and this page was last updated Jan 12, 2025.

Comments and Reviews

   
 Post comment/review
Top Positive Comment
jaymanyooheewho
★
★
★
★
★
•Jun 29, 2021
0

I like Tabula because it's the best, free, and opensource software that can quickly and easily extract structured data from PDFs.

It's quite powerful, yet easy to use. I've used it on PDF documents with table structured text data, with 100s of pages - to quickly extract this data into a csv format, enabling me to then import this data into a database.

It has a powerful Autodetect Tables feature, along with tools and settings to tweak and customise it's table recognition.

In my experience, it has been exceptionally accurate.

I've not used any paid tools, but this is THE best free tool. I have tried using Word, which does a very good job of converting PDFs into editable documents. But is a nightmare if you have a multipage document of structured data (say 400 page long table), and you want it to be converted to a structured format.

Cannot recommend more highly.

What is Tabula?

How Can Tabula Help Me? If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know how painful it is — there's no easy way to copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files. Tabula allows you to extract that data into a CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using a simple, easy-to-use interface. Tabula works on Mac, Windows and Linux.

Who Uses Tabula? Tabula is used to power investigative reporting at news organizations of all sizes, including ProPublica, The Times of London, Foreign Policy, La Nación (Argentina), The New York Times and the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press.

Grassroots organizations like SchoolCuts.org rely on Tabula to turn clunky documents into human-friendly public resources.

And researchers of all kinds use Tabula to turn PDF reports into Excel spreadsheets, CSVs, and JSON files for use in analysis and database applications.

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